Tuesday, September 24, 2013

So, yesterday, just as I had gotten Dez down for a nap, the phone rang.

Yes, the house phone.

While we do have one of those, the ringing part totally annoys me. If I could find a way to make it only work for outgoing calls, I would. Damn baby-waker.

But, anyway.

It was the school. They were giving me a "courtesy" call to let me know that I owed them money.

Say huh?! I knew I had written 50-11 checks to the PTA over the last few weeks, so what could I possibly have forgotten?

Playette's lunch.

$2.60.

Oh. Ok. Sure...

No, wait. WHAT?!

I clearly recalled creating the assembly line of the usual suspects and loading them into her lunchbox just so and then strategically storing her water bottle and snack in the side pouch of her backpack.

Just as I have done every flipping day she has gone to that school.

She doesn't like bread, so she gets tortillas. She eats slowly, so she gets just the right amount of crackers that she can consume in a timely manner. She needs her liquids thickened, so I pre-mix them for her so that no one has to figure it out mid-meal. She gets a fruit roll-up for snack because one day they were $0.25 a box at the commissary and I may have lost my mind just a little and filled up the cart so now someone has to eat them.

You know, stuff like that. This is my job, people.

This call was saying that I didn't do my job.

Not that they knew that, but still.

I needed the scenario explained to me slowly and in much detail.

Sucked to be the woman on the other end because she was getting all of this info second-hand and she had no idea how seriously I take my job.

Turns out that my super cute, way manipulative six-year-old told an adult, not sure who, that she had no lunch that day.

Poor thing! Bless her heart!

(gag)

Coincidentally, the hot lunch option that day was what she would choose as a meal if she could never have anything else again in life: pizza, french fries, and milk.

There may or may not have been chicken nuggets involved. I have not received 100% confirmation on that, but this is an on-going investigation.

She took great glee in describing the events to me when I interrogated inquired about them at pick-up. Someone gave her money! Pizza! Milk! French Fries!

I even took a video that would have been awesome to share if I hadn't dropped my phone in guacamole about two weeks ago and now the speaker is all jacked up and when I played the video back, every other word was cut out due to the unfortunate incompatibility of avocado and electronics.

Sigh.

We went on with our day, BD and I chuckling to ourselves over the absolute nerve of our child, but inwardly proud of her clever streak.

And then he went through her bookbag.

THERE WAS A BILL!

Or, if you're me, it's called a "Hey, mom (if we can even call you that), you screwed up and the PTA had to take temporary custody of your child and do the job you should have done and gave her money so that she could SURVIVE the rest of the school day because you obviously didn't care. That'll be $2.60."

I was happy to pay the money, really. She ate the pizza. And the fries. And maybe the nuggets, too. Also, the (non-thickened) milk.

But I mean, some people screwed up and those people weren't me. I could get all indignant about the details, sure. But the reality is that she's fine and she's happy and folks are on their toes with this "special angel" now. She probably really enjoyed the lunch line experience and felt like a superstar.

So, instead, I wrote this blog post so that I could get it out of my system and not bring it up in the IEP meeting tomorrow and take us all completely off-track. These are good people. Things happen.

One last thing: When did lunch start costing $2.60?! Shoot, I used to get free lunch for a while. This here is a pearl-clutcher for me.